I’m teetering against gravity in my seat. I’m rocking forward, engrossed in my newly made college friends who share the same shade as me. I’m fluid and tipsy from this atmosphere, confessions and intrusive questions that, for once in my life, make me feel seen.
“Do you notice that people will avoid sitting next to you in class?”
Now I’m falling, falling, falling. Falling backwards into a scene the question suspended me in.
I imagine my friend, trekking to floor E of Dwinelle with sweat on his skin that makes his melanin utterly noticeable. The students give him a wide berth, as he nestles in the Goldilocks zone of the class: too far to be picked, but close enough to be “engaged.” The flock take their positions, an invisible circumference surrounding him like an ant trapped in an inked line. “File in closer,” the TA calls. But each seat around him remains empty, marking his difference.
I tilt forward again. Forward into a circle where every spot is filled. My Black friends gather in the limelight of a backyard. We are the pathetic ants in an invisible circle: close, endearing, marginalized and finding refuge in one another.
Berkeley unwhitewashed me.
At an institution where progressiveness is practically a prerequisite, an empty seat should hardly constitute a political statement. Yet, UC Berkeley’s own campus climate data suggests otherwise. In its 2019 survey, 68% of Black undergraduate respondents reported experiencing exclusionary behavior. And while the university’s 2025 survey records improvement in campus comfort, respondents with multiple marginalized identities continue to report less favorable experiences.
Ironically, these students who unconsciously refused to sit next to my friend will participate wholeheartedly in the discussions against eugenics and racial division. They will engage in protests fighting the “good fight,” with intentions of being part of the change. They will shout, scream, kick and challenge the world. But when the lecture ends, those discussions become conveniently divorced from behavior. We assume that such activism and intellectual awareness absolve us of the responsibility of practicing it.
We will talk about the empty seat, without sitting in it.
In my first semester at Cal, I naively stood in line after class, waiting amongst the 800-student class to ask my professor a question about the lecture. It was syllabus week, and he had droned on and on about dedication to the pursuit of an opportunity — to reach beyond the limitations we impose on ourselves, to not exclude ourselves from success without even trying. As my turn finally drew near and my mouth formed the shape of words, I was preemptively cut off: “If you need to reschedule an exam for a game, please talk to the course coordinator.”
I hadn’t realized I’d made a team. My professor generously offered an accommodation I had never requested, on behalf of the team I had never joined. I wondered what had given me away. My backpack? My clothes? My build? Or, my skin?
The irony was difficult to ignore: He had spent the lecture asking us to imagine possibilities beyond our own expectations. I wonder whether he had imagined me for anything beyond the playing field.
Microaggressions identify the underbelly of Berkeley’s compliant ignorance. They are not exclusionary to only the students, but plague our esteemed faculty in the same vein. They contradict the prejudices they teach us to dismantle, or the seats they encourage us to take.
Elsewhere, my added “diversity” is a breeding ground for an out-of-touch curiosity. My “friends” assume the roles of unsolicited anthropologists, touching, analyzing and dissecting my identity as an experiment to measure the breadth of their cultural awareness.
My Filipino and Ethiopian heritage labeled “exotic,” my curls an invitation for wandering hands that equate it to tumbleweed within the same breath. They encourage me to be unapologetically myself, with the condition that I remain unapologetically different from them.
In Berkeley, activism continues to be a social currency that embeds itself at the center of diversity, progressiveness and obligation without meaningfully engaging in it. Their proximity is proof of their progressiveness. Their discomfiting curiosity masquerades as a cultural appreciation.
Yet somewhere between the empty seats, wandering hands and unsolicited assumptions, Berkeley unwhitewashed me.
It’s a peculiar paradox to credit this institution with restoring an identity I’ve been repeatedly made to question here. But their microaggressions paint my Blackness and make me more conscious of my failure to truly assimilate. The negotiating parts and the silencing of my difference were only accentuated in the most unexpected “activism” I’ve ever encountered.
I return to the backyard. I’m teetering against gravity again, surrounded by the very people whose experiences mirror my own. The confessions are increasingly intrusive, and the laughter is sufficiently loud enough to drown out the world beyond our little circumference. I am not somebody’s diversity. I am not somebody to sit next to out of mere pity. I am not asked to justify the space I occupy.
Berkeley did not unwhitewash me through its declarations or performances, but through people who understood what it means to be excluded. In a backyard full of people who have learned to recognize the drawn lines and invisible circles, I discovered that belonging did not require me to be more or less Black, nor more or less visible. We had simply made room for one another.
Perhaps that is where Berkeley’s activism ought to begin. We don’t need another proclamation of solidarity, but the ordinary, unremarkable willingness to see, understand and intentionally engage. A willingness to learn and take responsibility for our inherent biases and sly remarks. A willingness to make room. To fill the empty seat.
By making my Blackness all the more evident, Berkeley forced me into the empty seat. And in that seat, I was able to join a colony of ants, each aware of the outside, but home within the circle.